Structured Data Markup Was Inevitable, But Is It An Admission Of Failure?

The movement toward structured data markup (i.e., increasing use of standards like Open Graph, Schema.org, RDFa, etc.) has bothered me for awhile, but I could not exactly put my finger on the issues. A few weeks ago at SMX East, there were some great presentations on these topics, and I finally realized that I have many major reservations about the proliferation and use of these standards, on many levels (mostly from a publisher perspective; for end-users they are generally a very positive development). What Are These Standards? They sound complicated, but in layman’s terms, I would say: think of them as being similar to additional meta-tags on a page, similar to a meta-description or meta-keywords, but often in XML format, which convey certain structured information about various objects. Like meta-tags, these are intended to be machine-readable, but not necessarily prese...